Google is finally introducing something that probably should have been available a long time ago, real-time data for Analytics. At long last, webmasters can check out how many people are visiting their site or any page at any given time.

Real-time Analytics also enable webmasters to run more complex campaigns and to implement changes and fixes to counter issues as they arise.

"Today we’re very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens," he announced.

Real-time data can be a great benefit, especially for sites that deal with constant changes, traditionally, blogs and news sites.

With the viral nature of the web today, any site has the potential to see a huge influx of visitors and needs to know about it as soon as it happens.

Finding out hours later that one of your pages suddenly saw a tenfold or more increase in visitors is probably too late to do anything to benefit from it.

One great use for real-time analytics, as Google exemplifies, is with social campaigns. If you share something on Twitter, Facebook or even Google+, you'll want to see how it affects traffic to that page, as soon as you hit tweet, post, publish or share.

Google has another example of where real-time data comes in handy, it provides an immediate way of checking out if a campaign works correctly. When you're done with the implementation, you can test it yourself by visiting the page and seeing your visit tracked in real-time.

Real-time analytics only works with the new version of Analytics. It's also only available to a few users right now and is being rolled out over the coming weeks. If you can't wait, you can opt-in right now by visiting this page.